Heard Plans For Aged, Then Asked For More

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30568, 10 October 1964, Page 2

Heard Plans For Aged, Then Asked For More

(From Our Own Reporter)

HAMILTON, October 9. After hearing the Minister of Health (Mr McKay) give full details of the Government’s comprehensive programme for care of the aged on Thursday night, the National Council of Women decided at its conference today to ask for more.

The council’s concern is for elderly ambulant folk who are not ill enough to take up hospital beds but are too helpless to look after themselves in their own homes or pensioners’ flats. The council passed a remit asking the Government to make more money available to subsidise additional accommodation for this group. The need was for small units giving complete care to this intermediate group, said Mrs I. M. Blair (Napier). 1

The hospital boards did not want to accept responsibility for aged “non-sick” even when they could not be cared for in their own homes and this work was left largely to church organisations’ homes for the aged. “The hospital boards’ duty is to the care of the sick which includes the elderly when they need hospitalisation,” said Mrs M. J. Broderick (Hamilton). “Don’t think the hospital boards are not sympathetic. They are agitating all the time for more geriatric beds.”

Though the Government had been generous in its

subsidies for work for the care of the aged it had to be recognised that people were living longer and the population was increasing, said Mrs C. J. Ashley (Christchurch). There was likely to be a continuing urgent need for geriatric care for which consideration had to be given.